About us


Leadership team

Erin M. Buchanan
Data Lead

Timo B. Roettger Analysis Lead

Chenzi Xu
Scientific Lead Method Lead

Xinbing Luo
Project Manager

Indranil Dutta
Outreach Lead

Cong Zhang
Ethics Lead



ManyTones chenchenzi.github.io/manytones/

Big Team Collaboration


Join as a collaborator

  • Open to research labs, fieldworkers, linguists, cognitive scientists, and musicians
  • Collaborate in data collection and analysis
  • Co-author in high-impact, multi-author publications


Collaboration Agreement

Roadmap


Introduction and Aims

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Pitch in Communication

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  • Pitch carries information in nonhuman vocalisations, human music, and human speech
    • Physical
    • Emotional
    • Social
    • Semantic
  • Pitch: A percept of sound correlated primarily with fundamental frequency
  • Fundamental frequency (\(f_0\)): The lowest frequency of the vocal fold vibration

Primate evolutionary relationships.
Source: The Guardian, 2016

Pitch in Human Language

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Macroprosody

  • The number, alignment, heights, and shape of \(f_0\) peaks (Kohler, 1990)
  • Stress and intonation
  • Pitch accent and lexical tone

Microprosody

  • Vowel intrinsic \(f_0\) due to vowel height
  • Consonant-related \(f_0\) perturbations
  • \(f_0\) masking or variations in non-modal phonation

Macroprosody: Lexical Tone

Standard Mandarin tones

Cross-linguistic CF0

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F0 difference smooths for between voiceless and voiced over normalized time across 20 languages (Ting et al., 2025)


CF0

\(f_0\), especially at vowel onset, is higher following a voiceless obstruent than following a voiced one.

CF0 effect size ranges from 0.4-3.9 semitones across 20 languages (Ting et al., 2025).

The temporal extent and magnitude of CF0 vary considerably.

The Development of Contrastive Tones

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Five stages of tonogenesis based on Maran (1973)

Source: Kang, 2014


Production and perception in tonal decelopment

Stage II - III: Small CF0 perturbations are detectable by listeners

Stage III- IV: CF0 is one of the perceptual cues to the consonant contrast

Aims and Research Questions

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Minimal CF0 for onset pitch differentiation


Dynamic pitch perception in speech


Online framework for large-scale auditory perceptual data

To what extent can \(f_0\) perturbations be perceived?


How is the ability to perceive \(f_0\) perturbations distributed across the population, and what factors influence this perception?


Whether and how language experience and musical competence affect CF0 perception?

Methods and Pilot Study

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The Psychoacoustic Experiment Paradigm

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Schematic representation of the experimental paradigm of Hombert (1975, p.223 Part I).


Note

Participants adjust the fundamental frequency using a knob in Hombert (1975).

Our Stimuli

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Stimuli design

  • 6 perturbation duration: \(\Delta t = 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, 250\) ms

  • 8 perturbation frequency: \(\Delta f = \pm 10, 20, 30, 40\) Hz

  • 3 sound token type: baseline \(f_0\) of 150 Hz

    • Complex tone with 12 harmonics
    • Vowel [i:]
    • Consonant vowel [ti:] (with short-lag VOT: \(\approx 12\) ms)


  • Resynthesised from a male recording (44.1 kHz, 16 bit, mono)

  • Intensity normalised to 75 dB

  • Fixed token length of 250 ms

Our Pipeline

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Pilot Study

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New Update: A Gentle Guide to Montreal Forced Aligner

Preprocessing Procedure

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Timeline and Challenges

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Our Next Steps

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Challenges

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Thank you ⭐️

@ChenziAmy
@chenchenzi
chenzixu.rbind.io